A new definition of anthro-complexity

Participants in a meeting of the Japanese OD Network self-organizing in a dialogic container to discuss what they learning from an embodied experience of constraints, Kanzan University, Nagoya, 2019

Dave Snowden is publishing a TON of stuff these last few weeks, much of densely theoretical and full of references to thinkers and traditions that would probably take years to properly unpack. Nevertheless I appreciate these posts because “anthro-complexity” – the name he has given to his body of work – has been the most influential body of theory in helping me to think through the ideas of dialogic containers, hosting, sense-making, and leadership.

What has been missing from his work is a clear definition of anthro-complexity. I have described it as “the complexity of human systems” as a short-hand way of differentiating it from other ways of thinking about complexity. At any rate, Dave took a crack at a provisional definition this week:

Anthro-complexity holds that human complex adaptive systems are part of the natural world and embedded within it, while being irreducibly different from other natural systems in ways that matter for how we understand and intervene in them. Their agents have intelligence, identity, and intention: a reflexive capacity enacted in language, relationship, and cultural practice rather than located in any bounded interior; a sense of self always constituted in interaction with others, shaped by history, narrative, and cultural membership, and never fully available to conscious inspection; and the ability to act toward imagined futures in ways that alter the very conditions being acted upon. These are not complications to be managed but constitutive features of the system. Meaning does not simply emerge; it is enacted through embodied experience, narrative, and distributed social interaction, and it is always path-dependent, culturally situated, and shaped by history that cannot be undone.

This shifts the practitioner’s question. Not what this system is for, but what it is doing and what is becoming possible or impossible within it.  Not “what should this system become?” but “what are the energy gradients, what can be shifted and what cannot, and what micro-interventions change the conditions under which different futures become available?” The role is not to design outcomes but to attend to what is already emergent, to read the terrain: what flows, what resists, what the material, the skills, the habits, the experience and the natural evolved talent  (in other words, the craft) affords; and to intervene with and through the natural grain of how meaning actually forms rather than imposing frameworks from outside.

I like this for a number of reasons:

• The embedded nature of human systems means that we have to take into consideration the many contexts in which they are embedded and to which they are related.
• Meaning is both emergent and enacted, which means that people are making and enacting meaning alongside the emergence and enactment of the system. And as they do so they influence the system in different ways.
• Dave’s “practitioner’s question” is one that I too am trying to address. Yes to not designing outcomes. Yes also to attending to what I call (borrowing from Juarerro) the constraint regimes at play, which shape emergence, affordances, flows, exchanges, boundaries. attractors, connectors and identities.
• And furthermore, I agree strongly that the practitioners’s role is not imposition of frameworks or methods. In my practice I see methods as something I might call constraint-craft.

My own exploration of this world uses the term “host” for this work, as it connects to participatory practice in the Art of Hosting community and takes the emphasis off of the action of “facilitation” which essentially means “to make things easy.” I don’t do that. I design and offer scaffolding for experiences to for participants and groups to be together making sense of the work in order to act. And a lot of my writing here has been in-the-public thinking through of this problem of “facilitator as a person with an outsized profile” and “facilitator as a person who uses that power and trust to immediately vacate the field for participants to get to work.”

So I appreciate this definition and Dave’s continued clarity on these topics both as a way to clarify what we are actually talking about and as a set of ideas from which we can truly critique facilitation while also building up a role of host as complexity practitioner who crafts with constraints to enable meaning and action through and understanding of emergence, interaction and affordances. I think I have one more post in me on the series on theory that I have been writing (part 1, part 2, part 3) and it will be about the role and craft of the practitioner, the host, the person who builds the scaffolding of constraints, and what that craft looks like and what pitfalls we have to avoid.